Mandate, Mandate, Who’s Got the Mandate...

UPDATED Wednesday Nov. 5 2008 9:30 PM

If you were to go by the electoral votes, the election was won by Obama in something near a landslide; 349 to 159 (when last I heard; the numbers may have changed some). If you go by electoral votes, it was a clear mandate for Barack Obama and the Democrats.

I don’t go by electoral votes.

The word "mandate" is one that gets over-used during and after elections. The victors are always saying that they’ve received a "mandate" from the people and the losers are saying "Mandate? WHAT mandate?" And when the tables are turned, when the roles are reversed, someone else is claiming a mandate and someone else is saying it ain’t so.

The dictionary isn’t all that helpful; mine defines "mandate" as "an authorization to act given by an electorate to its representative" and by that definition any elected representative can say they’ve got a mandate. But a mandate to do what?

A mandate to do something implies something to do; somthing specific. A "general" mandate, a blanket authority to do what the elected official damn well pleases, isn't iomplied (in my view) by anything in the U.S. electoral system. I can’t remember any candidate for any office who ever ran on a single issue; likewise, I cannot conceive of any office that restricts its elected representative to deciding just one issue. When we elect people to office, we expect them to use their best judgment and act accordingly, but to think they’ve got any kind of a mandate to do anything is absurd.

Well, mostly absurd; a candidate who won a vast majority of the popular vote could say they’ve got a mandate from the people (though I’d still ask, to do what?); someone who has a scant 52% majority can’t.

As happy as I am about Obama’s victory, I must point out that his majority in the overall popular vote was 52%.

Just the same, Obama isn’t going to be just the President of those 52%. He’s our President, yours and mine and Keith Olbermann’s and Rush Limbaugh’s. All of ours. But this is more than just our responsibility to support them; it’s also their responsibility to serve us.

This, I think, is where the current Bush administration had failed. They stopped behaving as our servants, and started believing that we served them.

Think about it. They’ve curtailed our rights and tried to secure for themselves privileges far beyond those granted by the U.S. Constitution. They’ve detained and questioned and punished and spied and intimidated, all in the name of America, in our name, and clamed it was all for our own good and we shouldn’t ask questions. (That the courts, including the Supreme Court, have been calling them on this right left and center is a vindication of the system of checks and balances, the system which keeps any one branch of government from becoming too powerful, which the administration has also tried to gut.) All this we initially let them do...because we were doing what we were supposed to do, supporting our President in a time of crisis.

They dropped the ball, and we replaced them. That is also what we were supposed to do.

But don’t read more into it than that; if the Republicans had done a better job they’d still be in power. Saying that the Democrats have a "mandate" because they’ve won a 52% (barely over half of the electorate) majority is itself dangerous.

I remember George Bush and his supporters claiming a mandate after winning in 2000, and they didn’t even have a majority. Al Gore got the majority. But through a bit of manipulation through the Supreme Court, Bush was selected to be our President. No reasonable person could claim a mandate under those circumstances, yet there they were claiming a mandate.

And even though Obama won fair and square, even though he actually did get a majority, Obama won with a thin majority of the popular vote; it would be incorrect to claim that Obama has a mandate.

Even if he does have more of one than George W. Bush.

The Blues Viking

UPDATE: 9:30 (ish) PM--I've just been listening to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC refuting the assertion that Obama had no mandate; her point was that if Bush could claim a mandate in 2004 then Obama should certainly be able to claim one now. My point is that GWB had no business claiming a mandate in 2004 (much less in 2000) and just because GWB did it and got away with it that's no reason for Obama to behave in the same manner. I had hoped for better; and, to his credit, Obama's not the one making that claim, it's being made for him. By people like Rachel Maddow.

As much as I like her show (I watch it nearly every weeknight) I've got to say this is crap. Yes, Bush claimed a mandate in 2004, but he had an extremely thin victory and had no business doing so; and even though Obama has more of a right to claim a mandate than GWB he still doesn't have all that much. According to my dictionary, any majority can correctly be termed a mandate; but if you're saying that a "mandate" of eleven people in twenty is enough to claim that you've been given broad authority to do as you please than you're no better than GWB. Frankly, I think Obama is better than that. I hope so, anyway.

BV

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.